Hi all, I am working on the Fedora rpm package of FreeOrion and here are the mostly cosmetic issues one could easily resolve. But they do simplify packaging process a lot and make the package look mature.

1) Include freeorion.desktop, freeoriond.desktop, freeorion.png, and freeorind.png files for better desktop integration. You could add them to the FreeOrion/misc/ folder and forget them forever. You could get the example of these files from our repo https://github.com/RussianFedora/freeorion

2) Add LICENSE or COPYING. It seems to be GPLv2 but explicit license file is a must have according to the guidelines of big distros such as Fedora.

This is bad because I need to upload the data somewhere before using it. But more important this is bad because svn export command does not preserve checksums. It means that running these two comands on another machine will produce tarball with the same data but with the different checksum. Which is really bad for all automatic checks big distros usually do.

You can upload the ready to use tarball with proper format for each release to the Files section.

So these 3 items resolved would make packager life much easier.

P.S. There are some compiling issues I've got with newer versions of gcc. I will write separate post on them once I got the proper logs and patches.
Upd
found default/COPYING
so ignore number 2) please

There is a FreeOrion.ico in the root directory. I suppose you can't use that? Other icon files are in the Windows SDK, but not SVN. I've attached them.

Why does freeoriond need a separate icon / image, but not freeorionca? I suppose people might run the server separately, but not the AI clients? There is no available separate icon for freeoriond, at present. Artists might be able to provide one on request.

What do the .desktop files do?

Why do files need to be in SVN for you to use? Do they need to be at a particular location?

2) Add LICENSE or COPYING. It seems to be GPLv2 but explicit license file is a must have according to the guidelines of big distros such as Fedora.

Edit: I added the above-posted icons, though none at 48x48 specifically, to the default/data/art/icons directory.

Is there any problem with this version of the freeorion.desktop file? I'm not sure how it expects to be pointed to the icon files, and is there a reason not to run in a terminal window, which might show any output error messages?